


No Backup

by Deannie



Series: In Your Head Bingo [4]
Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Community: hc_bingo, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-09
Updated: 2014-07-09
Packaged: 2018-02-08 04:46:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1927116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Well, sit tight,” Jim told him softly. “Help’ll be here. Just hold on.”
</p>
<p>He was lying. Purposely, willfully. There wasn’t any reason not to. Blair was dying, but he didn’t need to spend his last hours in fear. That was a hell reserved for Jim alone.
</p>
<p>For HC_Bingo, prompt: trapped together</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Backup

**Author's Note:**

> Themed bingo: In Your Head. All stories must be written from single character perspective and the majority of the story must be that character with no real-time interaction with others (meaning flashbacks and imagined discussions are acceptable, but actual conversations are not).

Jim hefted Blair’s body higher up against his own, sharing what heat they had left between them and trying to ignore the dull beat of pain in his skull.

“Hey, hey, man!” he could almost hear Blair say, that laugh in his voice that could brighten your day or make you want to smack him, depending on how things were going. “People are going to start talking!”

“Hate to break it to you, kid,” he murmured in the darkness, “but they already do.”

Wouldn’t matter in a few hours, anyway. They could say whatever the hell they wanted and Blair would still be just as dead.

Jim had dialed down his senses of smell and touch enough not to have the stink of blood in his nose or the slick of it on his skin, but he refused to let go of the sound of Blair’s heartbeat getting faster and faster as his body gave out. Jim had bound the wound as best he could. The tourniquet had stopped the blood flow, mostly. But the damage was done and he knew, if he let himself, he’d feel the increasing heat as Blair succumbed to the infection that was bound to rise in him. If he’d had a field hospital nearby, maybe there’d be a chance. Or a saw to amputate the crushed limb.

“We could call you Peg Leg Sandburg,” he joked coldly.

Maybe if they weren’t trapped in a collapsed mine shaft forty feet below ground...

Blair had warned him not to go off half-cocked, hadn’t he?

“Let me call Simon,” he’d said. In Jim’s head right now, it sounded like he was being reasonable, but at the time, Jim had just heard Sandburg being his normal irritating self.

“Look, Chief, we don’t even know if Yardley is out here.” His memory twisted his own words to sound petulant and abrupt. Or maybe he was just remembering too clearly. “If we find him, we’ll call Simon.”

And he’d headed off into the forest. Like an idiot.

“Jim…”

Ellison jumped at the sudden word from his partner and Sandburg gave a hiss and a moan at the jostling.

“Sorry, buddy,” Jim murmured, using his senses to assess his partner. Blair was sweating in the freezing cave. His eyes, barely open, were glassy with shock and he clearly couldn’t see a thing. The smell of blood was almost overwhelming when Jim dialed his nose back up, but underlying it was the sweet stink of infection. As predicted, Blair was burning up. “How’re you doing?”

“Man,” Blair whispered, a tear escaping his eye as he shifted his torso and visibly bit down on a scream. “That is a stupid question.”

“Well, sit tight,” Jim told him softly. “Help’ll be here. Just hold on.”

He was lying. Purposely, willfully. There wasn’t any reason not to. Blair was dying, but he didn’t need to spend his last hours in fear. That was a hell reserved for Jim alone.

“You suck at lying, Jim,” Blair muttered. He shifted again, trying to sit up. “Help me up, man,” he gasped.

Jim listened to the sound of Blair’s lungs as they labored to get in enough oxygen to make up for the blood loss. He was starting to wheeze.

It wouldn’t matter if he sat up—hell, if his leg wasn’t crushed, it wouldn’t matter if he stood. Jim dialed down his hearing for the scream he knew was coming, and sat all the way up, bringing Sandburg along with him.

The scream didn’t come.

He turned the dial all the way up on his hearing, unconsciously tuning out his own racing heart.

No wheezing, no moaning, no heartbeat…

“Jim?”

 

“Jim? Man, come on!”

“What the hell happened, Sandburg?”

Simon…

“Ah, the place was unstable. Yardley was shooting at us and when Jim shot back, Yardley smashed into one of the supports— _God, that hurts—_ and started the cave-in. Crushed flat.”

Peg Leg Sandburg.

“So what happened to Jim?”

“Jim? Come on, man, just come on back.”

“Sandburg!”

Sandburg?

“Just give me a second, Simon. Get off me a minute—the leg’ll still be there.”

“Blair—“

“Just get them away for a few minutes, Simon. Please?”

 

“Jim? Look, I don’t know if you got overloaded or if you hit your head harder than I thought or what, but you need to come back now. Follow my voice.”

Sandburg?

“Come on. Come on, Jim—that’s it!”

“Blair?” Jim barely made a sound to his own ears.

Blair was all but shouting. “All right! Man, you scared the _crap_ out of me!”

Jim’s sight slowly came online, showing him the clearing just outside the mine. Blair sat against a rock and it took Jim a minute to realize that he was lying on a stretcher.

Sandburg looked pretty good for a dead man.

“Your leg?” Jim asked, trying to sit up and feeling too-keenly the bite of restraints on him.

Blair grimaced. “Hurts like hell. Why is it when I go into the mountains with you, I end up limping?”

Peg Leg Sandburg.

“Limping?” Jim tried to get up again. “Why am I strapped down?”

Blair ran a hand through his hair and Jim wondered if the kid knew that the hand was covered in dried blood. “We got caught in a cave in, man. That psycho Yardley brought the whole place down on us.” He looked at his blood-covered hand and shuddered. He gestured to his own head. “You got hit pretty hard by one of the beams when it came down. I thought you were fine at first, but then you just… zoned out.”

“Your leg?” Jim knew he was repeating himself, but he couldn’t figure it all out.

Sandburg grimaced. “Caught under the same beam, don’t you remember?” His eyes went wide and worried when Jim just stared. “Man, you pulled it off me.”

Jim remembered that. Blood and muscle and bone…

“JIM!”

He shook himself like a dog and looked into Sandburg’s face. The kid was sweating. Sweating in the freezing cave…

“Okay, look, man, you must be zoning on that—on, you know, how gross it looked—but it’s _fine_. I’m fine.” He reached out and grabbed Jim’s hand and Jim squeezed back, instinctively focusing on the feel of Blair’s heartbeat under the minute crackle of dried blood. “Focus on something else, man, because you really are scaring the crap out of me.”

Jim closed his eyes against a blooming headache, but they snapped back open as a question occurred to him.

“How’d Simon find us?” he asked, remembering their earlier conversation. “I didn’t hear you call him.”

Blair snorted. “Texting, man. The next big thing.” He squeezed Jim’s hand. “You didn’t really think I was letting you go in there without backup, did you?”

Jim smiled and succumbed to his aching head. “You _are_ my back up, Sandburg.”

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

* * * * *

The End


End file.
